Yoshi Touch and Go — Main Title Theme

Okay, so Yoshi Touch and Go is not a great game. Released in the very early months of the DS’s availability on the market, it is the kind of game that we would expect to pay $0.99 for on our iPhones today, and we would be justified in our expectation. It was very much a blatant attempt by Nintendo to advertise the touch-screen capability of the DS. “Look!” Nintendo seemed to say. “It has ‘touch’ right in the title!” This was about the time that their advertising campaigns included the slightly-more-ribald-than-Nintendo’s-usual slogan “Touching is Good.” Ha ha! Oh, Nintendo. You were right. Touching is good.

Pretty much the only lasting effect Yoshi Touch and Go had on my experience as a gamer was the sour feeling that I’d wasted all or part of $30 and an inability to use the phrase “touch and go” in everyday conversation for fear that one of my friends would append: “…Yoshi touch and go,” signifying that I had inadvertently stepped on one of our many mutually-agreed-upon conversational landmines.

Except.

Except this music, the title screen theme, an arrangement of the music box theme from Yoshi’s Island (a game which deserves to be remembered fondly), a piece of music that has essentially been stuck in my head for seven years.

I can’t quite explain it. Is it the faux-guitar? The ponderous, almost wistful whistled melody? What is it about this theme that has stuck with me for years, despite the fact that I owned the game for maybe a month? I never fell in love with the music box theme until I heard this arrangement of it.

This is a piece of music that makes me wonder– how many bad games are filled with great tunes? How much have I missed? I can only listen to Yoshi Touch and Go and contemplate.